GM Challenge - What’s in the village?

[NichG]

So what’s in the village?

System aside...

The scenario makes me think of a two-layered thing. On the one hand, the village collects people and things which have been sort of discarded or forgotten intentionally by the other villages in the area. Those who get lost in the area, those who are abandoned to die of exposure, those whose farms don't do well enough to support themselves and who aren't taken in by others - before they die, they see a path and if they choose to follow it, they end up in the village and become part of it. The villagers and their activities and effects are solid, but somewhat ghost-like in the sense that if they are killed, destroyed, or taken away, after some time has passed they are back at the village, things are back the way they were, and memories of the effect tend to fade. Stuff taken out of the village doesn't immediately disappear or disintegrate, but it tends to be misplaced once people aren't paying attention to it. It is possible for someone to leave the village permanently, but doing so requires some kind of permanent bond to the outside (marriage, adoption, taking someone as a disciple, granting someone formal ownership of land or property, etc). People in the village are generally aware of how they got there, can tell the story, remember events that have happened, etc, but the supernatural aspects tend to slide out of their mind - they know they've been farming that plot for a long time, but they won't remember if its 20 years or 200. They remember someone being killed and returning as just a severe injury, etc.

So that's the first layer of what's going on. At that layer, there'd maybe be a few people who might want to leave, someone who exhibits more detailed knowledge about the world hundreds or thousands of years ago that might be interesting to the party as far as other opportunities or leads, etc. There'd be someone who has fallen into the role of a village elder who wants to protect the village's mechanism of operation and moderately opposes people leaving (because unlike the others, they had more of a basis to realize that the village is actually making people unaging and they suspect - wrongly - that people who leave will just turn to dust or something).

All of this is basically a cover created in order to exploit the concept of 'forgotten people' and turn it into a defensive ward that enables things within it to generally be forgotten by the outside world. A subordinate (lich, celestial, etc - something immortal or long-lived, dependent on setting) of a major power that lost a world-spanning war in the past built this place to hide from the victors, along with a weapon or potent artifact supporting that reign that the other side (whose equivalent individuals are still around) would want to recover. It's not obviously good for the former victors to get the artifact or for this guy to walk the world with impunity, but things are currently somewhat stable. The subordinate isn't directly posing as a villager (that'd be a big waste of time to them), but rather has a pocket realm attached to an object in one of the villagers' houses - an ancestral / memorial shrine to someone who is absent from the village. It'd stand out as the only explicit reminiscence of a person who isn't alive and walking around the village. Notably that shrine is not in the 'elder's house, and there would be a more central shrine as a diversion.

The PCs, if they unraveled this, would have a lot of chances to mess with the status quo of the world or release a disruptive force. Telling the victors of the ancient battle the location of the village would bring down a planar war on the area, probably way out of its scale of actually resisting, but would be worth a favor from those forces (likely the artifact would be destroyed or sent off somewhere, so the subordinate would die but the former victors wouldn't get the MacGuffin). Stealing the artifact and giving it to those forces directly would avert the cataclysm but would empower those former victors to change something about the world in accordance with their ideals, for better or worse, but would get the PCs significant and transformative favor. The PCs could use the artifact themselves, which would allow extracting and re-distributing a conceptual event - minor uses would be small area and short-lived stuff and would be fairly free to experiment with, but the kind of major use that the former war centered around would require the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of souls bound into the artifact to implement the effect - possible if the PCs wanted to go that route, but not trivial to implement. The PCs could ally with the former subordinate (though he mostly wants to keep the artifact out of anyone's hands and just retire right now, vengeance or breaking the victors' stranglehold on the world would be attractive offers and he would have a lot of lore about ways to power he could give out in exchange) or could decide to fight/kill him themselves and loot the pocket realm, or even use the village as a base for its antimemetic and antiscrying properties (however, without an understanding of the artifact, the PCs' own memories of their base would disappear a few weeks after leaving...)